Florida Heir Wins Looted Art Collection
Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen.
Germany’s top appeals court ruled Friday that Deutsches Historisches Museum must return a collection of more than 4,000 posters to the son of Hans Sachs, a Jewish dentist who fled Nazi Germany.
The son, Peter Sachs, is a retired airline pilot from Sarasota, Fla.
Gestapo officials seized the posters from the senior Sachs in 1938, saying that Joseph Goebbels wanted them for a new museum.
The government-run Berlin museum has estimated that the posters are worth $5.9 million, according to Bloomberg News. The court issued a statement saying that “the owner of art lost due to Nazi injustices must be able to demand it back from the person who possesses it now, in a case where the work was missing after the war, and therefore couldn’t be returned according to Allied restitution laws.”
“I can’t describe what this means to me on a personal level,” Sachs reportedly said in a statement distributed by his attorney. “It feels like vindication for my father, a final recognition of the life he lost and never got back.”
